Top 53 deadly SEO mistakes that every digital marketer should avoid

Top 53 deadly SEO mistakes that every digital marketer should avoid In combination with engaging content, SEO tactics also play a key role in ranking a website. It is not just writing the long entailed blogs on the website, but also you need to be sure you have indulged proper SEO strategies for it. Many organizations from small to big corporate ones make common SEO mistakes that derail their website’s success. Improper focus on significant SEO needs could eventually result in shuffling your website ranks. This is important because the foremost search results would get more clicks and visits compared to other results.   Table of Content 1.Doesn’t have a clear SEO strategy 2.Creating plan in terms of days, not months 3.Making decisions on opinions 4.Low focus on development & their work 5.Importance of site structure 6.Not using a proper URL structure 7.Avoiding mobile optimization 8.Not paying attention to site speed 9.Forget who your target customer is and targeting wrong audience 10.Not understanding the concept behind search intent 11.Not identifying & optimizing proper keywords for SEO 12.Keyword cannibalization 13.Overload an article with the main keyword they are targeting 14.Over optimization of keywords stuffing & link stuffing 15.Avoiding overlooking keywords data in Google Search Console 16.Not optimizing for local search 17.Overlooking E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) 18.Lack of quality content, its strategy &content optimization 19.Lack of informative articles 20.Building links without having link worthy content 21.Using plagiarized content 22.Writing 1 or 2 SEO blogs a month 23.Restrictions for crawling through robots.txt or meta robots 24.Neglecting the importance of Structured Data 25.Neglecting page meta-tags 26.Too many tags and labels 27.Forgetting image optimization 28.Not taking full advantage of internal linking 29.Avoiding putting a call to action on every page 30.Only focusing on on-page SEO 31.Focusing on backlink quantity over quality 32.Not checking quality of the backlinks 33.Overlooking effective off-page SEO techniques 34.Outbound linking to authoritative sites 35.Not putting enough time and energy intocatering to voice search 36.Invest lots of time and money in guest posting 37.Paying for backlinks 38.Not submitting website to be indexed by google 39.Leaving the staging site indexable in Google 40.Good SEO goes far beyond copying what everyone else does 41.Not investing in tools 42.Not keeping up with your data 43.Missing optimization as a USER 44.Attributing positive performance to the wrong changes 45.Taking SEO marketing too seriously 46.Running technical SEO audits too infrequently 47.Focusing on technical aspects of SEO instead of the revenue-driving pieces 48.Completely rely on automation 49.Looking for shortcuts 50.Being old-school 51.Copying the strategy of competitors 52.Still using unsecured websites 53.Rest on their laurels once they hit the target 54.Conclusion Here, we have displayed the most-common SEO mistakes that should be avoided by the organizations. Doesn’t have a clear SEO strategy “A clear and common SEO mistake is someone who doesn’t have a clear SEO strategy. SEO can get very complex and if you don’t have a clear strategy then it will be hard to attain good results. You need to understand where you are at compared to your competitors so you can get an idea of which keywords to target. Identify the low hanging fruit opportunities and build from that. Make sure your website has a good foundation in terms of technical SEO.” - Andres Aguero, SEO Manager at Barbeques Galore “I'd say one of the biggest mistakes that I see companies make when it comes to SEO is siloed focus on one aspect of SEO instead of looking at it holistically. SEO is a long-term play that can have an incredible impact on a company. However, it takes patience and consistency! If the only thing you focus on is trying to build trustworthy links to your website through outreach and guest blogging, then you're missing some of the other huge parts of SEO, such as content creation. ' Instead of looking at SEO as individual pieces, it's important to look at it as a supply chain. If one piece doesn't work or breaks down then the entire thing can be affected. Like a well-oiled machine, SEO must be practiced holistically on a regular basis.” - Haley Anhut, Content Marketing Manager at Clean Origin Creating plan in terms of days, not months “The most common mistake I see is a straight-up lack of grit. Most of my affiliate marketing students give up when they don't see their traffic take off within a few months. The Google sandbox, which lessens the clout of newbie websites for 6-12 months after launch, is there for a reason. Think about it... Why would Google want to put a site with ten pages of content, that's been around for only three months, in its top 10 search results? They wouldn't. So if you're going to do SEO, create your plan in terms of months, not days.” - Brandon Walsh, Co-Founder of Phone Truth LLC Making decisions on opinions The truth is, most online businesses, at some point, will have a blindfold on when it comes to measuring results. Do not make decisions based on opinions, what Bob told you worked on their site, and who your competitors are. Measure every inch with Google Analytics and make decisions on results. Your blog content can be producing 80% of your results, and you'll continue to dive into Ads without any tracking. Track all of your marketing efforts and deploy context to your business and cut losing marketing efforts.” - Mike Zima, Co-Founder of Zima Media Low focus on development & their work “One of the common SEO mistakes made is not keeping close to the development team's work in the company. As the developments can result in layout changes and content changes to the website it could have a detrimental effect on SEO, adding a long Out of Stock sentence to product pages in our website Kasera resulted in many of our products being flagged as duplicate content and resulted in rank and traffic loss.” - Rahul Mohanachandran, Co-Founder & Head of Marketing at Kasera Importance of site structure UI “One of the biggest mistakes that are commonly overlooked by many digital marketers is the idea that they overlook the importance of site structure. By positioning your website in a hierarchical structure, this will allow for better organization, user experience, and set your pages up to thrive when internal linking and receiving backlinks. Additionally, this makes it exponentially easier to scale up or out when needed.” - Grant Kneble, Digital Marketing Manager at Curotec Not using a proper URL structure “The most common mistakes that can ruin your rankings - not using a proper URL structure. Google is looking for websites that are not only informative but also easy to navigate. When it comes to being informative, you need more content on the topic of your website. For the latter matter, you need to create a logical path people and crawling bots can go through to find your content. That path must be human-readable and connect different content pieces, creating a tree structure of your website. Example of a good URL structure: domain.com/services/furnaces/furnace-repair Example of a bad URL structure: domain.com/repair1232 - GlebZavizenov, SEO Expert at Gleb-seo.com “One common SEO mistake people make is not keeping your URL short. Keeping URL's simple and accurate help search engines and people understand what your post is about. Including keywords in your URL can help you rank in search as well. Make sure to use lower case letters and use hyphens to separate the words.” - Alice Anderson, Founder of Mommy to Mom Read More: An Ultimate Guide To Schema Markup And How To Use For Seo? “I still see digital marketers using underscores in URLs instead of dashes. Google tells us explicitly to use dashes because their crawlers see them as separators or spaces between words. Underscores are not treated in the same way and will actually confuse crawlers. This is important to know because if crawlers cannot parse the words you use in your URLs, you’ve lost an opportunity to optimize your pages for the keywords you’ve targeted.” - Paul Franklin from SideGains “Failing to optimize your URLs. Too often marketers will create content and publish webpages without taking the time to optimize their URLs. Most know to create a title and meta description, but too often they will leave the URL to auto-publish on its own, resulting in very long URLs that just take the title and replace the spaces with hyphens. Research suggests that shorter URLs, targeting a specific keyword perform better on Google. Not to mention if the content of your post changes, for example, if you add another 5 tips to your existing list of 10, your URL will have to change with it, resulting in a redirect that could have been avoided in the first place. So if you're writing that blog post on a topic within your industry, and intend on ranking for it, make sure to remember to optimize your URL before hitting publish.” - Max Allegro, Digital Strategist at Intuitive Digital Avoiding mobile optimization “A common mistake an SEO digital marketer should avoid is overlooking mobile optimization. Recent data show 87% of internet users use mobile phones to access the web. With this in mind, Google has moved to mobile-first indexing since July 1st, 2019. Mobile optimization is critical to boosting your SEO ranking and will likely become increasingly important throughout 2021. Other common mistakes are over-stuffing your keywords to try and cheat the SEO ranking system and forgetting why you have your audience's attention, so stay on topic and stay conversational.” - Eric Holguin, Brand Ambassador for Herrman and Herrman PLLC. “SEO optimization does not circulate about content and keywords. It’s also about the quality of your website, especially its performance on mobile devices, which are users’ top choice today. Google and other search engines can identify when your website is not mobile-friendly (think about the Mobilegeddon update). If you haven’t considered a smooth mobile experience and a fast page load-time for your audience, your rating on search engines can be endangered. The same goes for load speed, as search engines put an importance on that as well. You shouldn’t be astonished if a slow website leads to lower SERP. You can use online tools like Pingdom and GT Metrix to examine where the speed problems come from and how to fix them.” - Shayne Sherman, Tech Expert and CEO of Techloris “One of the most common mistakes every digital marketer makes is that they forget to properly target their mobile user audience. They keep building their website’s desktop version while their mobile version while lacking the user-friendly aspect continues to lose a major portion of their organic traffic.” - Damien Martin, Marketing Executive at Shufti Pro “*Mobile-first means more than responsive design* I still see big-name sites killing their responsive design from a technical perspective, but failing to alter their content to account for the same audience. Very few of us produce content on our mobiles, so text density and layout tends to follow desktop browsing principles. Actually *look* at your pages on your phone after you've hit publish!” - John Bedford, Founder of Viva Flavor “Usually, I find customers are aware of mobile speed and its impact on SEO. Then it gets lost in the mad rush of content production and promotion. Recently I worked on an eCommerce store that gets most of their traffic on mobile (which is not uncommon). The slow mobile experience was costing them sales and affecting their bottom line. Creating AMP pages for them boosted their conversion overnight.” - Annette Clubley from SEO Uncomplicated “One of the biggest SEO mistakes to avoid not making your website mobile responsive. Ignoring mobile devices means you're cutting your reach by as much as 50%. On top of that, mobile responsiveness is one of Google's ranking factors today. Hence, your search result rank may suffer if you don't make your pages mobile-friendly.” - Kate Diaz, Owner/Writer at Swanky Den “Not optimizing for mobile users is a common SEO mistake that’s a really big deal. More and more website visitors are using mobile devices, and they’re used to mobile-friendly sites, so if yours isn’t optimized for mobile, they’ll leave your site quickly without a second thought. Digital marketers most often work on computers, so it can be easy to forget that their audience often does not use computers.” - Sara E. Routhier, Managing Editor at AutoInsuranceEZ.com Not paying attention to site speed “Not paying attention to site speed is a major SEO mistake that a lot of website owners don't think about. Site speed is critical for increasing conversions. In order to ensure our mobile site loads quickly, we have compressed our images. This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality. We also took steps to minify all our liquid code and prioritized script load order while trimming down the total number of scripts being called. Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing image assets on others helped reduce site load time as well. Also, we started to use AMP on our blog pages which reduced page speed load time under 1 second. As a result, we've seen a 20% lift in traffic to our blog. Bringing more traffic to our blog increases the likelihood of making a sale as customers continue to navigate through the site.” - Brandon Chopp, Digital Manager for iHeartRaves “One SEO mistake that I see commonly on many sites is underestimating the importance of page loading speed. Most users would expect a page to load within 2 seconds and anything beyond that they are just going to visit your competitor's page. In today's fast paced world, users prefer information that can be consumed easily and fast. Therefore, the slower your page is, the higher the bounce rate will be which leads to poorer SEO in the long run. In order to improve page speed, I would ensure my images are optimized for size without compromising on quality. I would also remove unnecessary plug-ins that can slow down the page speed. In order to evaluate page speed, I use Google pagespeed insight to get a rough estimate of how fast my site is.” - Albert Lee, Founder of Home Living Lab “The one common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid is forgetting to pay attention to your website's speed. Many marketers don't know how important your pages' loading times are for your rankings in the search results. Faster websites rank higher, so you can increase the amount of organic traffic to your site just by improving your website's speed. Tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights are great to help you monitor this.” - Angie Makljenovic, Owner of She Can Blog Forget who your target customer is and targeting wrong audience “My best tip for SEO writing is to never forget who your target customer is. Write for them and keep your language targeted for your dream audience. Don’t use jargon or weird keywords that don’t fit with your brand and your audience. Once you have this foundation, it’s easier to optimize for improved SEO performance than to try to craft something entirely out of keywords and search phrases. Write first, then revise and optimize second.” - Aalap Shah, Founder of 1o8 “Targeting the wrong audience is one common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid. The most important step in establishing a business digital marketing plan is business UPS. Many digital marketer mistakes in understanding the business UPS which lead to trouble in the understanding of the right audience for the business. *Example*: If a business is related to Jewellery Designing. A digital marketer needs to know who is likely to show an interest in Jewellery. To find the right audience create a buyer persona based on information like: Age Gender Income Demographics Interests After creating a buyer persona it will be easy to understand & target the audience and lead to a high conversion rate for a business.” - Eric Smith, Digital Marketing Expert with Kool Stories Ltd. “*Focusing On Keywords and Not Users* When planning your SEO and content strategy, it's essential to have your users and their search intent in mind, before thinking about specific keywords. In many cases, the searchers use completely different terminology and queries to look for your product and service. Understand the search behavior of your users and you'll be golden.” - Amir Shahzeidi, Digital Marketing Manager at Uscreen One destination for Custom Software Development Solutions - Enquire Today SEE HERE “It should already be understood that creating website content (such as blog posts, service pages, FAQ's, etc. ) is the key to driving performance on Google. Hands down, the number one SEO mistake that I see digital marketers make is not conducting sufficient research to truly understand what their target audience is looking for online. Too often marketers write what they or their clients THINK is the best content to write about, not reasoning it with data or statistics. What's the solution? Take the upfront time investment to develop marketing personas, analyse your competitors' top-ranking pages, and conduct social listening to see what others are looking to acquire information about. Like Abraham Lincoln said: Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” - Colby Cave, Director of Digital Marketing at Imagen Media “One common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid is optimizing keywords for the wrong audience. As SEO professionals we spend so much time on keyword research looking for the best keywords to rank for. Sometimes we find keywords that are low competition and relevant to a business's products. However, our core audience isn't using those specific keywords to search for the business's products. Instead, the core audience is using a different set of keywords that is relevant to them. They are using their own language instead of the language that a certain business uses to describe their products.” - William Teo from Kadima Digital Not understanding the concept behind search intent “I've found a lot of junior marketers often undervalue the importance of search intent. This is a grave mistake that can really have a negative impact on your conversions. All the market and keyword research in the world won't help you if you don't know why someone searches for a phrase. For example, if someone searches marlin fishing that would seem cut-and-dried. They are likely searching for a way to fish marlin. But are they looking to book a charter? Do they want to see a list of locations near them? Maybe they just want tips on proper fishing techniques to catch marlin. You have to look at patterns of behavior to derive search intent, otherwise you're taking a shot in the dark.” - Jonathan Newar, CEO of Captain Experiences “One of the most common SEO mistakes that people make nowadays is not optimizing the content for Google. And what i mean by this is your article/post has to answer the search intent. If your keyword research in Google SERP returns listicles/roundup posts, you create a listicle/roundup post. If it returns how-to articles then you create a tutorial, etc. The content must match whatever Google is expecting for it. Because this changes overtime you should update your content for whatever the google is asking/ranking.” - Kasia S., Owner of woodenpalletprojects.com “One of the most common mistakes we see on with our new clients coming from other agencies is that pages are optimized for keywords, but not for the intents behind the keywords. This reduces efficiency of client pages. In lamest terms, “Get Car Insurance” vs “Car Insurance Quotes” are different in intent – former is rather a transactional query while the latter is an informational query. Thus, you would likely need different content to rank for these terms. However, even if it seems obvious, we always recommend to google it first and see if your feeling matches what Google thinks.” - Sasha Matviienko, Director of Digital at Growth360 Not identifying & optimizing proper keywords for SEO “The biggest SEO mistake I see businesses making every day is using the wrong keywords for their specific line of business. The first step to optimizing your content for SEO is identifying the perfect keywords for your product or service in your industry. What are the right keywords for your product or service? What are your potential consumers searching for? What solution is your product or service offering? This process can be tricky and time-consuming. Test and analyze this data until you find the best keywords that will generate you the most sales.” - Jon Zacharias, CEO and Founder of The Search Guy SEO is one of the most important marketing strategies for small businesses. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to get organic or unpaid traffic from the search engine result page. So the higher you rank on Google, the more opportunities you will have to get traffic to your site, which is a big win. The most important factor in SEO optimization is using the right keywords for your business. Understanding the optimal keywords that people search for to find your product is the first step. Second, creating content that includes those keywords and answers to the questions the potential consumers might be asking. The most common mistake I see businesses make with SEO is rushing the process of keyword research, which leads to inadequate content creation that fails to bring in expected traffic.” - AshwinSokke, Co-founder of WOW Skin Science “The biggest mistakes I see businesses making when using SEO tools are not using the right keywords. When it comes to picking the right keywords, most businesses don't realize that they need to pick the correct keyword depending directly on what type of business they are and in which industry they exist.” - Brandon Monaghan, Co-Founder of Miracle Brand “I think is the most common is that business owners are not optimizing the right keywords for their pages that often brings traffic to the website. I understand that most website owners know their product or service but they should be aware that customers or clients have different words in their mind when doing a search query that leads back in finding your website.” - UlysisCababan, Content Strategist at RapidVisa “It's common to see people writing articles without conducting any keyword research first. Sometimes, writers just assume that people are searching for the content they are producing, which is a big SEO mistake. You should always take the time to check that the topic is being searched first. Not only will you know if it is viable for SEO traffic but it will also likely shape your content based on the types of keywords being used. Writers are often able to unearth new angles through keyword research too, resulting in a more in-depth piece.” - Adam Lumb, Site Manager at Cashcow Ltd “Using Wrong Keywords: This is one of the most common mistakes that digital marketers do in SEO. Choosing wrong keywords or sometimes using very general keywords so the competition with other websites will be very tough, I think it's better to use, or specific and let's say more local keywords to your website. So, the competition will be less and your website will be in better ranking.” - Vince Massara, C.C.O at Your Fitness Radar “One of the biggest SEO mistakes I see companies making going after high-volume keywords only, thinking that they will win significant traffic that way. The thing is, high-volume keywords have lots of competition and many brands think the way you do. Instead, aim for lower volume keywords with very low to non-existent competition. For example, instead of writing content around a keyword that gets 5,000 searches per month, write for a keyword that gets 500. Bottom line is, volume is not everything. Instead, focus on lower competition and higher intent for conversions.” - Jane Kovalkova, CMO of Chanty “One of the many common SEO mistakes that digital marketers should avoid is using the wrong keywords. In fact, we see a lot of companies targeting keywords that are too broad or competitive. For example, mortgage refinance rates will have a high search volume, but it is a very competitive keyword. Instead, it would be best if you targeted a similar keyword that is easier to rank for, such as refinance house loan or va mortgage refinance, both of which still see a good number of searches each month, but are much less competitive. Additionally, they are starting to get more specific. We have also noticed that many marketers don't want to target keywords that have lower average monthly searches. In our example, something like best refinance home mortgage loan rate might not be considered worthwhile. However, it has a low competition score, and it is an extremely specific topic. If you are looking to start getting first page rankings, you can start with some of these lower competition and search volume keywords that are much more specific. As you get more first page rankings, Google might start ranking your other pages targeting other keywords higher as well.” - Chelsea Roller, Content Manager at Rank Fuse Digital Marketing “One of the most common pitfalls we see with SEO clients is wanting to rank for certain keywords without first conducting keyword research. Many of them come to us having been burned by past “experts” who have used this strategy with lackluster or damaging results. Targeting keywords that you think your audience is looking for without having the research to back it up is a waste of time and resources, especially when there are tools available to eliminate any guesswork. We’ve found success using hard data to identify ranking opportunities that are both relevant and winnable for our clients.” - Adam Binder, Founder of Creative Click Media “A lot of people fall victim to not being unique enough with their descriptions of products, taglines and titles and this has quite a negative effect on their SEO. Often people misunderstand the importance of keywords. Although critical and correct optimization for your keywords is essential, there is a fine balance between using keywords and overusing them, especially in - where I previously stated - product descriptions, taglines and titles. Remember that you need to attract viewers as well, and a boring, keyword-focused approach may not be the right attitude.” - Andrew Taylor from Net Lawman “Not researching keywords before creating and publishing content. We all get excited about the topics that we want to talk about. We also want to answer common questions that our audience has about the topic. The problem is that those common questions tend to be very competitive to rank for. If you spend a few minutes researching the keywords, either using a free tool or a paid one, it can mean the difference between getting seen and not getting seen. For example: 'How to Optimize for SEO' is a very difficult term to get on page 1 of Google for. Alternatively these terms are less competitive: Search engine positioning or SEO positioning Search engine optimization guaranteed SEO solutions SEO internet marketing A common oversight many content creators tend to have is in putting these keywords in the 'ALT' text of their images. This is the text that will be displayed if the image cannot be displayed. Google checks the Alt text for keywords and ranks the image for those keywords. So it's worth adding researched keywords to the images as well as in your headers.” - Sophia Nomicos, Founder of Mas & Pas Limited “One of the most common mistakes many Digital Marketers make is the selection of wrong keywords for SEO purposes. Targeting the wrong or irrelevant keywords for SEO elements on the site pages diminish the efforts and also the organic growth. SEO professionals perform the keywords research before preparing recommendations for on-page SEO but they don't perform the research correctly and select only the top keywords which seem relevant to them on the first look. It may be due to time constraints or lack of information or understanding. The keywords strategy should be done in such a way that the website should cover maximum key phrases relevant to the site's offerings which should include local keywords (for business serving locally), long tail key phrases (in query form), and the trending keywords. The sites ranking on top in your niche are the best source to prepare your list for target keywords.” - AkashDwivedi, SEO Head at Desertcart Keyword cannibalization “One mistake which we frequently notice, irrespective of the company size is keyword cannibalization. Marketers often fail to track the keywords they include in their content, which results in two or more content pieces competing with one another. It's a wasted effort. This situation could be easily avoided by creating the right SEO structure in the form of content clusters or at least by regularly keeping track of all the keywords that your brand ranks for.” - KasiaKowalska, Co-Founder at Contentki.com Overload an article with the main keyword they are targeting “One common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid is to overload an article with the main keyword they are targeting. For example, if the main keyword is habits, writing an article with this keyword in every sentence would sound and feel unnatural. Imagine reading this sentence: Habits are beneficial in our daily lives. Habits allow us to automate processes and excel in whatever habit we have. Habits... Google penalises this type of behaviour and bad experience for the readers.” - Clovis Chow, Founder of Time Organize Study. “I still see many digital marketers and business owners making mistake is writing as much content surrounding one topic area as possible. Spreading it across multiple blog posts and pages in an attempt to boost their chances of ranking, and as a result, cannibalising their keywords. Whilst this tactic worked many moons ago, this is no longer the case. Content should be well planned and structured. Focusing in on one pillar page (content cluster) and building offshoot blogs that go into more detail on the specifics. Ultimately with the goal of making you the authority in that topic area.” - Lucy Johnson, Founder of SHiDO Read More: Best Seo Optimization Tips For Podcast That Ranks Easily Over optimization of keywords stuffing & link stuffing “Being a founder of a company that helps businesses to grow, I think Keyword stuffing of your target keywords in every sentence of your content thinking it would increase your ratings is a myth and a black-hat practice. That strategy couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, going overboard with using keywords is considered spammy by search engine crawlers, which means it actually hurts your SEO performance. That’s why keyword *‘stuffing,*’ or overusing your intended keywords, is not important for your SEO success. Such an approach would make your content unnatural and useless for its intended audience. In fact, Google is applying a special semantic search called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This program can recognize your content’s topic without the need for stuffing your content with repetitions of your target keywords.” - Rorie Devine, CEO and Founder of GRO.TEAM “One of the most common SEO mistakes that I come across still in 2020 is keyword stuffing. Every SEO expert knows the importance of targeted keywords, but some overdue it and it ends up doing more harm than good. I always recommend that anyone doing SEO use keywords naturally as a human would read it, not a search engine. Examples of keyword stuffing can be including adding keywords that seem out of place or out of context and repeating words or phrases excessively. Also using keywords that are not relevant to the page you are trying to rank for is another example of keyword stuffing.” - Matt Zajechowski, Outreach Team Lead at Digital Third Coast “Keyword and Link Stuffing The most common SEO mistake that people often make is taking the keywords they've found and links to their pages that make money and add them as much as they can to their web pages which often leads to Google considering their content spammy even if the links and keywords are still relevant. The key to including great keywords and internal links is balance and relevance so take care to provide the most useful keywords and links and don't try to force content where it just doesn't work based on the context.” - David Adler, Founder and CEO of The Travel Secret “with more people continuing to stay at home and surf the web, the best SEO strategy in 2021 and beyond will remain to create comprehensive blog posts that are optimized and targeted for relevant keywords. While many brands are attempting to implement this strategy, the biggest SEO mistake we see brands making is to include as many related keywords as possible in the blog post (i.e. keyword stuffing). This can actually be quite counterproductive, as Google's algorithm has evolved to detect this kind of activity and penalize it in search engine rankings. Rather, an effort must be made to include substantive discussions in the post which address the questions underlying each of the related keywords. By doing this, the blog post has the greatest chance of ranking well for multiple high volume keywords and getting as much exposure as possible.” - Jessica Rose, Chief Executive Officer of Copper H2O “By far, the most common SEO mistake is keyword stuffing, where marketers overuse focus keywords in hopes of higher search visibility. An example of keyword stuffing would be: If you’re looking for the best car accessories in the neighbourhood then look no further. We offer the best car accessories to all our clients. Search for the best car accessories by shopping on our website now! The focus keyword appears 3 times in 3 sentences. 9 out of 37 words are keywords, which means the keyword density is (9/37) x 100 = 24. This is a fatal SEO flaw since the standard keyword density should be between 2% to 3%.” - MountainiseTeam from MountainiseInc “*Over Optimization* Whether its keyword stuffing, title tags or word count, over optimization is a risk every marketer faces. The truth is, there's still much we don't know about SEO and while we could follow all the advice out there to the letter, unless it actually gets you results, it's useless! The best strategy you can take to optimize your content is to implement and react. If you notice a technique is working well, go after it and make the most of it while you can. If certain content or techniques aren't then don't. It really is that simple. Don't chase theory. Chase reality!” - Mark Webster, Co-founder of Authority Hacker “Keyword stuffing should be avoided in any way because it cause negative impact on the site and search engine will downgrade your site ranking due to this. Use keywords in an intelligent way to make sure it makes sense with the sentence and use its synonyms to write a fully comprehensive article/blog.” - Noman Asghar, Digital Marketing Expert at Fan Jackets “One of the most common SEO mistakes I see is over-optimization. As an example, suppose you have written an article about the best blenders in 2020. Your inclination might be to title it “Best Blenders (2020)”. This would be a mistake as you will likely receive an exact match penalty for queries such as “best blenders”. Instead, consider a title with a similar intent like “The Top Blenders For Any Budget In 2020”. - Zack Gallinger from Talent Hero Media “One of the most common and most dangerous SEO mistakes I see is that people completely disregard ideal keyword densities in webpage content. If the content overuses a keyword and exceeds a healthy keyword density, Google will consider it to be keyword stuffed and penalize the page. On the other hand, underusing keyword can make it challenging for the page to rank as the Google algorithm takes page content into account for ranking purposes.”. - Lee Dussinger, Lead Marketing Strategist at WebTek “Only using one keyword, and using it as many times as possible. It’s important to remember how internet users search to find content and then target a wide variety of keywords about your chosen topic. Try to think of several variations that a consumer may use to search, and sprinkle those diverse keywords into your content a healthy amount of times (2-3 max). For example, if you want people to find your article on cannabis concentrates, that can’t be your only keyword. People may be searching for a variety of terms like, “What are cannabis concentrates,” “how to make concentrates,” “dabs,” and more. Never stuff keywords into the article just for the sake of doing so – this will not only look bad to readers, but to Google’s algorithm and will negatively impact your search engine ranking.”. - Beth Adan, Director of Marketing at NisonCo PR “The biggest on-page SEO mistake I see people making is intentionally writing content with keywords in mind instead of writing for people. It's very difficult to write well when you are thinking about stuffing words into what you write. Instead, you should erase the concept of keywords from your mind and write in order to inform and answer questions. When you are finished, you can go in a make small word tweaks to make it more search engine friendly.”. - Dave Hermansen, CEO of Store Coach “Stuffing keywords and reaching more than 50% density is a no-no. SEO article writing is a technique we use to rank higher on search engine results by developing content using specific, targeted words or phrases, called keywords or keyword phrases. Optimizing content for webpages brings in relevant leads who need sound pieces of advice and are influenced to sign up for our services. SEO content is more than just plugging keywords into your existing content, quality content is organic and natural, enticing your reader to want more. It never feels outsourced. Your brand's SEO enhanced content should naturally flow and represent your brand. A business' marketing team should learn how to analyze relevant keyword data based on search volumes, website relevancy, and competitive value. Such valuable data should be used to create a targeted strategy based on the functionality and design elements for every page of your website.”. - Michael Hamelburger, CEO of Expense Reduction Group Avoiding overlooking keywords data in Google Search Console “The most common SEO mistake digital marketer should avoid is overlooking the keywords data in Google Search Console. This is the most accurate data for keywords that people use to reach a website. Analysing those keywords data (appearance, clicks, and average position) provides valuables performance insights. Using these insights, one can decide when to change the contents of a page, or when to optimize Meta Tags and other keywords related on-page elements.” - Shankar Kumar, Co-Founder and Head of Digital Marketing at SkeegTen, Inc Not optimizing for local search “Not optimizing for local search Not using region-specific keywords may be hurting the search for your brand, especially when it caters to a specific place or area. To combat this, brands must put in their local addresses and their local phone numbers so that they can be found through local search, and they must list themselves on review pages like Yelp to be more easily searchable.In our case, we are a Hong Kong-based digital marketing agency. Majority of our clients are based in Hong Kong, so we’ve geared our website to rank high on local searches. We’ve put in our address, contact details, and we’ve translated our content and articles into Chinese to cater to the local audiences. Not using internal links Internal links are links that lead to another part of the same sites. Not using internal links reduces the opportunities for your page to rank higher when searched for. The more internal links are mentioned, the better its chances are of ranking higher on the search engine.” - Bernie Wong, owner and founder of Social Stand Limited Overlooking E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) “I see one common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid and that mistake is overlooking E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). Search has changed and became more about expertise, authority, and trustworthiness today. Classic SEO practices still work, but when not powered with E-A-T they deliver much less than they used to deliver a few years back. For example, a simple thing like an official BBB seal (a sign of trust) on your website can drastically improve your SEO performance over a relatively short period of time.”- Nijat Huseynov, SEO Expert at TonerBuzz Lack of quality content, its strategy &content optimization “The most common SEO mistake I see is not making good content to begin with. Make sure whatever you're creating is valuable to your target audience. It could answer their question, solve a problem, provide direct information or more. Do all the right things in terms of title tags, page speeds, links, etc. But, be sure that the core content is actually good and useful to your target audience.” - Marin Perez, Director of Content at Kajabi “A common seo mistake marketers should avoid is focusing too much on keyword research that they fail to connect this to what’s needed in the real world—high-quality content. Most marketers who start venturing into SEO focus too much on keyword research that they don’t have a clear plan on how they can write the best article/page around that keyword. Some think that adding the keywords to their title tags and meta description is enough. But take a look at the results on page 1 of Google and you’d quickly realize that’s not the case.”- Ariel Lim, Digital Marketing Consultant at ariel-lim.com “Ignoring the quality of the content: One of the most common SEO mistakes is ignoring the content itself. While focusing on other necessary stuff such as; keywords, heading, and subheading, etc. Usually, they ignore the importance of the quality of the content, what benefits it will give to people, and whether they will continue reading the content or not. Most importantly, whether the content is matching people's needs and interests. So, all of the efforts of enhancing the SEO might be gone if the content wasn't acceptable to the people. That's why we need to focus on content quality when it comes to SEO thing.” - Jeremy Ong, Founder of HUSTLR Inc. “The number one SEO mistake I see brands make comes down to poor quality content creation. Brands want more links and organic traffic. However, all of their content is “me-focused” like product pages and company news. The solution lies in creating a content marketing program that attracts links. In the software industry, I recommend studying Close.com and Gong.io to see how they use content to improve SEO results.” Bruce from BruceHarpham.com “Content created solely for SEO purposes needs to appear more Natural and Conversational. One mistake people make when writing an article for SEO purposes is the fact that it often reads as though it is robotic, pieced together with keywords, and meaningless. Too many articles designed to enhance SEO rankings read like they’re a piece of marketing copy and they don’t engage people as much as they could. Keep your copy as natural as possible to increase the chances of having others share it, link to it, quote it in their own content, and more! Write your content as if you involved in a conversation to improve SEO results. People will engage with authentic and high-quality content and be more tempted to link to it if it is quality content.” Jus Chall, SEO Expert at Skein “One common mistake that businesses often make is crafting content for SEO, rather than crafting engaging content and optimizing it for SEO. In our fast-paced consumer society, marketing agencies and departments seem to try to produce as much content as they can, crafting written content and blogs with specific SEO keywords in mind. However, original, compelling content should drive content creation, not SEO tactics. Using proper SEO methods should enhance and elevate the content. It’s important to remember that we are trying to market to emotionally-driven humans and not search engines. Compelling content will be heard and seen.” Amanda Moore, Founder and CEO of Fovea Creative “One common SEO mistake that I often see digital marketers make is writing content purely for search engines, without considering the user experience. Google is advanced enough to recognize content that's written to manipulate Google via keyword stuffing, unnatural language, auto-generated/spun content etc. Focus on the user first, search engines second and Google will reward you.” Dan Foland, SEO Director at Postali “Though there is a need to base your content on the top keywords for SEO, some digital marketers fail to understand that there is still a need for them to provide UNIQUE CONTENTS. Sometimes, due to the desperation of stuffing their creations with relevant keywords and ideas, their finished products would end up showing as exact copies of other contents. This could get worse especially if that “duplicate” content has already been thriving in SEO, as it would only put your own copy into oblivion. Bottom line: Providing SEO-based, yet unique contents is very crucial for your work to thrive and stand out.” - Allan Borch, Founder of Dotcom Dollar   “Concentrating on box-ticking and meeting arbitrary formulas; keyword repetition and placement, getting a certain number of link backs and so on, can all help to support your SEO endeavors. However, the key here is that they play only a supporting role to the main goal; providing quality content. Losing sight of this is a really common SEO mistake made by digital marketers. Producing quality content is the best form of SEO, as it works organically to attract and fulfil readers, who will stay on the page, visit other pages, share the content, and return in future. This is what results in the best SEO performance, and losing sight of this to concentrate on formulaic SEO approaches is a huge mistake.” - Polly Kay, Senior Marketing Manager at English Blinds Lack of informative articles “I wanted to share one common SEO mistake people make is lack of informative articles. Some websites focus on quantity and aim at having as many articles as possible. However, these pieces are often quite short and uninformative. SERP is now very precise and able to identify long, quality pieces and prioritize them. Word count is very important and it may be better to have fewer articles with more content. Otherwise websites won’t rank well despite their packed posting schedule.” - MikkelAndreassen, Customer Experience Manager at Dixa Building links without having link worthy content “The most common SEO mistake is building links without having link-worthy content. Generating backlinks is arguably the ranking factor that correlates the highest to increased rankings. Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is the ones that rank high and get links are educational and helpful content, not their homepages. The best type of links are editorial links—the ones added by real people, not the ones where you can do it on your own. Looking at it that way, would someone link to your website if it has nothing to offer?” - The Marketing Introvert Using plagiarized content “Plagiarized Content: This is one of the most common issues that affect SEO. Maybe in the past, it wasn't that big deal, however, due to the ever-evolving SEO practices and techniques. SEO can be affected very badly when you use plagiarized content. So, it's really crucial to create original content that has the right keywords that match the reader's preference to guarantee good ranking on search engines.” - Gerardo Juarez, Company Director at Sheepbuy “This may be a shock, but I’ve seen multiple companies / clients copy and paste the same content from someone else’s site, or reuse their own content several times. This will only hurt your SEO, and make it much harder to get the website out of the weeds when you have to hire a professional to come in and help. Spend the time or the money on writing original content for your website with targeted keywords. There’s no excuse for plagiarism.” - Lora Bovie, SEO Editorial Associate at Choosing Therapy Read More: Guide To Guest Blogging For Seo And Common Mistakes To Avoid Writing 1 or 2 SEO blogs a month “Most digital marketers make the mistake of writing 1 or 2 SEO blogs a month and then calling it quits. This is a waste of time and money. You should treat your SEO blogs the same way you treat your social media content. For example, if you aren't posting quality and valuable content consistently, your Instagram account won't grow. If you aren't posting SEO blogs at least once a week, your blogs will never be able to rank on Google or drive traffic to your website. Be consistent with your SEO.” - Tiffani Daniel, CEO & Founder of Your Creative Content, LLC Restrictions for crawling through robots.txt or meta robots “The main SEO mistake that is most often allowed is in the restrictions for crawling through robots.txt or meta robots. For example, those restrictions often affect assets like CSS and JavaScript resources. This makes it impossible for pages to be fully fetched and rendered which means that crawling bots don't know what your page looks like, which could miss a piece of your content, and will also consider your project as not mobile adaptive. Great care must be taken when restricting the access of crawling bots to the project, because this often leads to undesirable consequences.” - Borislav Ivanov, Sr. Technical SEO at Best Response Media Neglecting the importance of Structured Data “*Neglecting the importance of Structured Data* Structured data is something that many SEO experts ignore. The importance of structured data is immense because it helps you stand apart from the crowd. It gives that extra special touch to your listing, especially when you are ranking on the first page in Google. Sometimes, structured data helps you feature above the first search result. The catch is that your listing looks bigger as compared to the others.” - Adam Rowles, CEO of Inbound Marketing Agency Neglecting page meta-tags “One all-too-common SEO mistake is neglecting page meta-tags. The meta tags influence how your content appears in search engine results, and can have a big impact on your pages' rankings. Having tags that are either auto-generated, poorly-written, or nonexistent, are a common issue facing websites, but an easy one to fix. With any simple SEO plugin (for example, Yoast's WordPress plugin), you can modify your pages' meta-tags and tailor them to your relevant keywords and the audience you are trying to reach.” - Andy Cabasso, Co-Founder at Postaga Too many tags and labels “A common SEO mistake is too many tags and labels - People often put. 5+ tags or labels on their articles, which all link to other articles that share the same tag. - Poor CTR (Click through Rate). Google doesn't like it when you have a ton of internal links on your website that nobody uses. Realistically, most of your customers won't click a single tag, and the ones that do will only click one.” - Adrian Higgins, Founder of Musician Nerd Forgetting image optimization “The most common mistake I see is Marketers overlooking image tags. As search bots can't actually see the images they are completely overlooked and do not appear in searches and are not recognized as another form that you are using to target audiences.” - Jenny Abouobaia from SEO with Jenny “Images are a fundamental part of our websites and blogs. One of the most common SEO mistakes that we see all the time, even from seasoned designers and content managers, is the use of high resolution images on their websites. Designers provide big top quality images for the content team to use it as needed. The content team assumes that what the designer has provided is the right image to be uploaded to the website. This makes the website slower over time.” - Juan Pineda, Managing Director at Agile Digital Agency “Crawlers can not read images. Hence it is essential to add an image alt text. And even if you are adding your blog targeted or LSI keywords, it will be more flattering to rank a particular image. When I read other organizations' articles, I can see that people are not using image alt texts in their blog images, and even if they are using them, it is not relevant. So missing an image alt texts from the blog images are huge losses in terms of SEO. Other important mistakes are below: Ignoring On-Page Optimization:* Ignoring an on-page optimization such as not adding the primary keyword in the title, meta descriptions, and heading tags, ignoring index bloat, ignoring unnecessary pages indexed in google which are not value-added and increase our crawl budget, not fixing, faciated, pagination URLs, trailing slash issues, etc. If you don’t fix on-page issues, then you won’t reach your goal, and you won’t be able to find an increase in traffic, leads, conversions, and ROI. Website Speed: Many website owners create visually impressive websites. They use to add videos, GIF, 3D images, using more stylish fonts. These will slow down their website. It was discovered that over 53% of visitors are more likely to leave a site if it takes around 3 minutes to load. Therefore, it is necessary to routinely monitor and optimize your website's speed with a speed test that's available online.” - Ashish Goswami, Sr. SEO Analyst at Bexcode Services Not taking full advantage of internal linking “A common SEO mistake is not taking full advantage of internal linking. Internal links, which are links that go from one page on a domain to another page on that domain, are a key element of SEO. These links, and their anchor text, help Google find and understand the different content on a website. To get the most out of internal links, SEOs should ensure all related pages link to each other, and that the anchor text is a high-priority search phrase.” - Bruce Hogan, CEO of Software Pundit “One common SEO mistake that every digital marketer should avoid is not prioritizing internal links. Internal links can be a very powerful tool in your quest for higher rankings, since internal links are used to transfer link juice throughout your website, and therefore, you must prioritize, and put time aside, to create internal links on your website., Many marketers don’t spend time doing this - or some purely rely on their content management system (such as Wordpress) to create their internal links. This is not the most optimal way to create internal links, since these systems mostly don't add the internal links in the best location for SEO purposes.” - Victor André Enselmann, SEO Expert at Bankly Avoiding putting a call to action on every page “One important goal every digital marketer should make is to keep the visitors to your site. Without a call-to-action button on your pages, visitors will immediately leave your site.   To encourage and keep visitors to your site, you need to put a call to action button on every page. This can be a buy button, sign-up button, or get a quote button. Make sure that the call-to-action button on your page stands out from your design. It must be clearly visible that the visitors will not miss it. When visitors click through your CTA button, you will keep them longer on your site, and they have a bigger chance of converting.” - Randy VanderVaate, President and Owner of Funeral Funds Only focusing on on-page SEO “One SEO mistake we avoid is only focusing on on-page SEO. Both on-page SEO strategies and off-page SEO strategies help improve search ranking, increase website traffic, and generate more quality leads. Google takes into account many off-page factors when ranking your website. So, it is important to also focus on off-site SEO strategies like creating backlinks, guest blogging, or social media marketing.” - Scot J Chrisman, Founder of The Media House Focusing on backlink quantity over quality “In particular, going for backlink quantity over quality. Sure, it’s a lot harder to get links from high-authority websites, but it’s definitely worth it. Getting links from authoritative blogs gives you a competitive advantage, as they have much more value. It’s better to get one 80 DR link than ten 5 DR links. This is among the biggest SEO mistakes digital marketers do. Avoiding it can result in huge benefits for your business and your search engine rankings position.” - Denis Metev, SEO Specialist at heartifb.com Not checking quality of the backlinks “One of the biggest mistakes you can make in SEO is not checking your backlinks when an agency or a freelancer builds them. You have to check the anchor, the context, the overall health of the website, the footer links, the images, the quality of the content and much more. There is a huge difference between a cheap and an expensive link - an expensive one will seem fully natural and placed in a high-quality page. On the other hand, cheap links are thrown in with a random anchor on a page completely unrelated to your website. You may have the reasoning that “a link is a link, no matter what”, but the quality really makes a difference.” - Petra Odak, Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals Overlooking effective off-page SEO techniques “One mistake made by digital marketers is overlooking effective off-page SEO techniques. Lots of marketers get comfortable with just a few techniques and leave out the rest. Broken Link Building is a really effective tactic that is often overlooked. This technique requires finding webpages linking to pages that are broken on either your own website or a competitor's. This is so effective because websites don't want to have links on their site that are broken so if you can suggest a working link that will keep the user interface running smoothly for their readers, they are likely to add your link. It is also great for your company because old broken links make it harder for potential customers to find your site from other sources.” - Nina Jensen, Community Outreach Manager at 8x8 Outbound linking to authoritative sites “An SEO mistake that is commonly overlooked is outbound linking to authoritative sites. Many times when I'm helping someone get a blog up and running they'll have a few articles. More often than not I notice they never link out to other websites, besides Amazon. When asked, they usually give an answer about not wanting to send traffic to another site. But Google looks at this as a way to show legitimacy on your own site. Real, high quality websites link out to other websites when appropriate. Beginner SEOs should know this but it's really mentioned.” - Troy DeVille from Core Mountaineering “Adding a site to a registry that sucks in traffic rather than bestowing authority. This goes back to a lesson I learned 10 years ago, but it's still valid. There was a local directory site that made big inroads in our area. It was really visible in all of the search results. It would seem like a no-brainer that it should be a place to list my site-- even pay to have my site listed. After I got a paid entry, my search engine position started to fall. When I looked up my website in search engines, the local directory was getting rankings for my keywords (company name, etc.) and ranking way above my position. Their size and backlinks gave them a strong position. They linked out to the client sites in a way that killed off the transfer of authority (a no-follow backlink that went through a redirect script). Lessons learned: now I pay close attention to how third parties reference the sites they link to.” - Shawn DeWolfe, Lead Developer at Web321.co Not putting enough time and energy intocatering to voice search “One of the biggest SEO mistakes I feel people are making these days is not putting enough time and energy into catering to voice search. Voice search is swiftly becoming the top method of searching via mobile devices and it's unwise to ignore it. You're losing out on a ton of business if you do. Optimizing for voice search is a matter of psychology. You have to understand the shorthand people use when they search via voice queries. It's worth studying up on and testing to gather data specific to your market.” - Ravi Parikh, CEO of RoverPass “You do not exist today if you cannot be found online. Being invisible is a terrible strategy so making sure your site is keyword rich/mobile friendly/loads quickly/produces meaningful content is the price of entry/great foundation for effective SEO but my top tip is that websites must be optimized for voice search. Voice user interface allows users to interact with websites through voice commands adding usability and functionality to your site making it accessible to all users including those with limitations/disabilities. It is about complying with the ADA, responsible web design, CSR goals and good for the bottom line too.” - Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO of Mavens & Moguls Invest lots of time and money in guest posting “A major SEO mistake in my opinion is to invest lots of time and money in guest posting to acquire backlinks online. Guest posting takes lots of brainpower and energy. And if you pay freelance writers to produce these guest articles, they can be very costly too. Is it really worth it, when at the end of the day, you'll only get a backlink on another website that will barely send you any traffic? I don't think so. Publishing a guest post can be a good idea once in a while to spread the word about your business, but there are much better ways to acquire backlinks for free. Guest posting offers a pretty bad ROI in my opinion.” - Gregory Golinski, Head of Digital Marketing at YourParkingSpace Paying for backlinks “A common SEO mistake to avoid is paying for backlinks. A backlink is when another website has a link that directs to your website. From the point of view of google, this is seen as another website vouching for yours and therefore making it stronger. The issue is that google has begun to track down on these paid backlinks and will negatively affect your website.” - Tino James, Owner of Sunrise House Buyers TX Not submitting website to be indexed by google “One of the most common SEO mistakes is not submitting your website to be indexed by google. You can do your keyword research and write the most compelling copy, but if your website is not searchable by prospects - what's the point? WIX has made it extremely simple to connect your website to google, as it’s available right in their dashboard. Wordpress will require you to add a plug in link like yoast SEO, and then you will have to walk through their tutorial to get it set up. To increase your traffic and sales ensure you don't make this common SEO mistake!” - Shannon De Souza from DeSouza On Demand Leaving the staging site indexable in Google “the biggest mistake that we see time and time again is leaving the staging site indexable in Google. This is a big mistake as firstly, you have 2 websites trying to rank for the exact same content, meaning you become your own competitor. Secondly, if your competitor aresavy enough, they can see exactly what you have planned for release on your website. Whether its a sale, new brand you have items for, etc, and they can be one step ahead of you as they know your every move. On the flip side, if your competitor is the one who has left their staging site indexable, you can see what they are planning to do in the near future. Moral of the story - ALWAYS deindex your entire staging site!” - Rebecca Devine, Outreach Manager at Launch Site Boost Good SEO goes far beyond copying what everyone else does “A lot of SEO professionals forget that really good SEO goes far beyond copying what everyone else does. For example, competitor backlink analysis is a crucially important part of most SEO projects, but there's no need to call a job 'done' when you've researched and replicated as many competitor backlinks as possible. Spend more time looking for gaps in the market where competitors maybe fear to tread. The best SEO is creative and agile, and this is just one example.” - Andrew Laws, Managing Director of Andrew Laws Associates Ltd.   Not investing in tools “Most digital marketers are not investing in tools that can help them gather crucial data for their SEO strategy formation. Using such tools is very important to hit your SEO target. It wouldn't just provide you the specific keywords you need but they would give you other valuable insights like customer feedback, engagement metrics, page insights, personalized targeting, performance and efficiency campaigns, and even budget optimization.” - Daniel Carter, Founder of Zippy Electrics   “Every digital marketer should avoid telling a client that they or their client should only use Google Keyword Planner to identify the most effective keywords for an SEO campaign. Although Google is the authority for search engine ads, it doesn't always give the best results for what people are actually searching from a strategy perspective. SEO campaigns are intended to generate organic search leads, there are many paid tools that are more effective for SEO keyword research such as SEM Rush, Moz or many others.” - Geraldine Convento, SEO Expert at MeetGeraldine.com   Not keeping up with your data “Not keeping up with your data- Make sure that you are tracking your data and its progress over time. There are many SEO tools that you can use on the internet that will help you see how well your company is doing on the web. This lets you know if the strategies you are using is helping your company or if you need to try something new. If you don’t track your data, then you won’t know what you need to fix. This is a common mistake many companies and small businesses make because they don’t know how to use these beneficial tools to help them grow. You will not gain benefits from SEO if you do not use it correctly.” - Andrew Ruditser, Lead Technology Coordinator at MAXBURST, Inc.   Missing optimization as a USER “SEO can be managed in several ways. There is no right or wrong. But one of the most crucial mistakes today's SEOs are doing- is not testing the sites they are optimization as a *USER*. Most SEOs are using tools, and crawlers and their creativity and strategy are getting blinded by it. What happened to our very own strategic eyes?? It is very important to test your sites and judge it from a user POV.” - LirazPostan, Content Expert at LP Marketing Services Inc   Attributing positive performance to the wrong changes “I think a more and more common mistake is attributing positive performance to the wrong changes. For example, recently adjusting a meta-description and seeing a positive uptake in CTR may seem like a direct correlation, but Google ultimately decides what meta-description to show and it could be that they have shown something different to wat you changed. In general, digital marketers should try their best to understand exactly why changes have happened as it can often not be as clear as it initially seems, and a greater understanding of the data will always lead to better insights!” - Louis Watton, Digital Marketing Executive at Shiply   Taking SEO marketing too seriously “The most common mistake that every digital marketer should avoid is taking SEO marketing too seriously at any given time. With Google's algorithm changes and almost AI approach to ranking, there is really no fast track to the big time anymore. I think if a website has the fundamentals of SEO correct namely lots of well-written content around a keyword that has been around for 6-months to a year with a few links to get it started you should never have any issues and should never be concerned around an algorithm change.” - Shaun Taylor from Moriti Safaris   Running technical SEO audits too infrequently “Running technical SEO audits too infrequently. Technical SEO audits should be run on SEO software, on an automatic schedule, ideally twice a month. These technical SEO audits help the marketer focus on fixing website problems and improving the user and search engine crawling experience. For example, a technical SEO audit can catch links that have errors without having the digital marketing team having to click on all the links on the website. If a link is not working, users have a bad user experience and search engines take notice as well, which affects negatively SEO rankings.” - Dr. Juan Izquierdo from drjuanizquierdo.com   Focusing on technical aspects of SEO instead of the revenue-driving pieces “Focusing on the technical aspects of SEO instead of the revenue-driving pieces. Oftentimes SEO campaigns prioritize the nuanced issues with a site, which usually requires a heavy development piece. Instead, the focus should be on competitive gap analysis, content marketing programs, user experience, and site relevance. Organic traffic and revenue can and should be the top, if not the second-highest, traffic, and revenue driver to a website. SEO’s mistakenly tend to focus on the seemingly “interesting” technical pieces first that end up yielding a smaller result towards business growth.” - Megan Conahan from Direct Agents   Completely rely on automation “Automation is a huge part of gathering data within SEO, but being wholly reliant on this data is a recipe for disaster and a mistake everybody should look to avoid. Site crawls, rankings and visibility should all be checked (and re-checked) manually where possible. As an SEO agency, we know there’s no substitute for building up a full knowledge and clear picture of a client site through a hands-on approach, and whether you’re working in-house, or agency side, the best practice is to avoid being completely reliant on automation and no making the mistake of trusting software 100%!” - Keith Hodges, Head of SEO at POLARIS   Looking for shortcuts “The biggest mistake digital markers make is looking for shortcuts. SEO is a long game and you need to invest accordingly. If you want instant gratification, PPC is a better, albeit more costly and unreliable, route. Google is always trying to deliver the best content to its users so your #1 priority should be writing differentiated, helpful content. Of course you'll want to take the obvious measures like proper headers, targeting a keyword, good technicals, etc but those are table stakes. If your content isn't good, any success will be short lived.” - James McGrath, Co-Founder of Yoreevo   Being old-school “SEO is an innovative marketing edge, and if you're not having it this year, it's time to consider having one for your business. However, even SEO has mistakes. Here's one: *BEING OLD-SCHOOL. *Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “The only constant in life is change.” In a fast-moving internet and marketing industry, your SEO needs to keep up with modern changes and developments. If not, of course, you'll be left behind by those adaptable to changes - your prior efforts would be in vain. Those days are gone when you can rank by using keyword stuffing, PBNs, and other traditional methods. Goggle is also getting older but wiser. Traditional SEO techniques can penalize your site but can’t outrank your competitors. As they say, modern problems require modern solutions. Keep up with the flow.” - Owen Drury from ODDigital Copying the strategy of competitors “Digital marketers tend to focus on researching their competitors while failing to take time to learn the needs of their target audience. It is important to understand that your rivals can make mistakes (and they probably do), and by copying their strategy you will follow the wrong lead. A better approach would be to understand your users and start thinking the way your customers do. This way, you will better know which keywords should be a part of your link building strategy and which should make their way to your content pieces. This, in its turn, will improve your traffic and conversion rate metrics.” - KseniaKhirvonina, PR Manager at SE Ranking   Still using unsecured websites “I believe digital marketers are still using unsecured websites. These days web users are very interested in security, so if your website is not secure and you are missing an SSL certificate, this will be a huge redflag for users. You may offer exceptional content, but if you don't offer asecure experience, SEO efforts are useless. Many browsers and antivirus software will prevent visitors from accessing websites that do not have an SSL certificate. This means that your site will be invisible to potentially thousands of users simply because your site lacks an SSL certificate.” - SimonasSteponaitis, Marketing Manager at Hosting Wiki   Rest on their laurels once they hit the target “As a digital marketer, SEO is one of the things we usually look at. One thing you should always remember is SEO is continuous. It never stops even though you're already number one. Your SEO strategy changes every time Google changes the criteria. That's why, when doing it, you should always audit, analyze, and improve your website. Some people tend to rest on their laurels once they hit the target. You should never do that with SEO. You should always continue to audit your site at least once every quarter. Staying on top of the curb is the only way you can maintain your ranking. And knowing what the changes are ahead of everybody will keep you there. Never forget that there is nothing like a sure thing in SEO. You should always expect to adapt to the changes.” - Jeremy Harrison, Founder of Hustle Life   Conclusion It is a fact that every organization makes certain SEO mistakes that directly affects their website rankings. But learning from the mistakes and fulfilling the site with fine strategies would be a great move. Here in this blog, we have discussed all the SEO mistakes that generally occur. Observing these and planning the approaches could lead the organizations to their website’s success. It is also recommended to keep the prior focus on certain tactics like site speed, engaging and quality content, optimization, responsiveness, etc.